Intrigued by Scott Hanselman's blog post and podcast on Office 2007, I finally managed to carve out some time to give the Beta a try.  I'm totally stoked about the overall usability improvements, particularly in Word, but, as with all Office releases, Outlook is the application by which I live and die.  Outlook 2007 doesn't disappoint, although most of its improvements are really subtle in nature.

I installed Office 2007 Beta on a VM, as I wasn't going to install it on my office workstation or laptop (I've been busted for that sort of thing before) and I don't really have time to play with it at home (since I'm usually spending time with my wife and kid).  But once I got it installed and running in my VM, I figured there wouldn't really be any harm in having Outlook connect to my Exchange message store on the corporate network from my VM.  It was in that way that I was able to try out some of the cooler functionality, like calendar overlays using my coworkers' shared calendars.

That said, I discovered a couple rather interesting features.  The first problem was that I couldn't get my Outlook profile to operate in cached mode.  It kept throwing an error that the offline cache file wasn't a valid PST file.  Then it would present me with a dialog box to select an OST file.  The only OST file in the dialog, Outlook.OST, threw the same error, so I assumed it was the file that caused the problem in the first place.  I tried giving the dialog a PST file, but it then told me that the file I had given it wasn't a valid offline cache file.  Well, no kidding!  But an OST file isn't a PST file, and it complained about that, too.  Sheesh.  So I gave up on cached mode and just ran in online mode.

The other problem, which caused a fair amount of anxiety for me, was when I started Outlook and it complained about my rules being bad and having to convert them all to client-only.  This wasn't what bothered me.  What bothered me was when I went back to Outlook 2003 on my laptop and none of the rules actually worked, I couldn't delete them, and I couldn't add any new server rules via the "Create Rule" context menu in the inbox (only client-only rules, although the Rules dialog seemed to work to create new server rules).

True, I could workaround the rules issues, but I don't like workarounds.  I like things to work the way they're supposed to work.  That was problematic for me, though, because I don't know thing one about Exchange Server, and I could just imagine the trouble I was going to be in if I had to go to the Exchange Server admin and ask him to fix it.

Luckily, as it often does, Google saved my butt.  Turns out I'm not the only one who had the problem.  I didn't have access to Web Outlook as one of those posts mentions, but a little more Googling turned up the /cleanrules switch.  I ran Outlook 2003 with /cleanrules, re-built my rules (luckily I only have 5 or 6 of them), and all was right in the world.